Monday, May 19, 2014

"The Third Charles Tucker:

By Christina Moore

_____

Part
One: Vanishing Act

October
31, 2161

He
laid his head down on the pillow, weary from his day’s work. Being a department
chief was one thing, second officer another. But first officer? One step down from captain? It was exhausting
sometimes, it really was.

Not
that Charles “Trip” Tucker III regretted taking the job as Columbia’s second-in-command. Truth be told, he rather liked the
crew looking up to him, either because they needed his help with something or
simply because they admired him for one reason or another. No man (or woman,
for that matter) could ignore that feeling, the one where your chest swelled
with pride because you were liked and respected by the people you worked with.

Didn’t
mean a long day—or long night, as he’d just gotten off his last third shift
of the week—wasn’t capable of wearing you out.

Trip
lay still, his eyes closed, hoping for sleep. Real sleep, mind you, not the kind where his psyche was plagued
with dreams of what would never be. Of a life that had ceased being his years
ago. He didn’t know how much time had passed since he had lain tiredly on his
bunk, but he finally felt himself starting to drift off, his last thought
another fervent prayer for dreamless sleep.

*****

Erika Hernandez, captain of the
Starship Columbia, sat in her office,
a steaming cup of coffee in her hand, going over Trip’s third shift report.
He’d had a busy night, supervising the repairs and upgrades in the engine room,
the armory, and here on the bridge. They were on their way back home for an
inspection, and like she, he was determined that Columbia would be in top form. Chances were they were on the verge
of being decommissioned—it had been almost seven years since their launch,
after all, and the warp 7’s were in production now—but hope ran abundant
through the crew that they might just get a few more years out of this ship.

The sudden jolt that nearly had her
turning her cup over in her lap and scalding herself with the hot liquid was,
naturally, quite unexpected. Erika quickly set the cup down and dropped the
datapad containing Tucker’s report on her desk, stumbling as she rose and made
her way across the office, the ship still shaking forcefully.

“Report!” she called out as soon as
she made her way through her office door and out onto the bridge.

Rachel Walcott, her second officer
and pilot, left the command chair and shooed the relief pilot out of her seat so
she could take the controls herself, calling over her shoulder, “Some kind of
spatial disturbance, Captain. We just…ran into it!”

“Well, run us out of it,
Lieutenant!” said Hernandez, struggling to get into her own chair as the ship
shook a third time. She hated to do this to a man who’d just gone off duty, but
it looked like they might need him, so she looked over at her communications
officer and said, “Get Commander Tucker up here—now.”

The young man nodded and started to
carry out her order. Hernandez finally seated herself, though she held tightly
to the arms of her chair as the ship shook yet again. “Mr. Brace, any idea
what’s going on out there?” she asked, directing her question to her science
officer.

“None yet, ma’am,” Daniel Brace said
over his shoulder, his eyes pressed into the reader at his station. “All I have
so far is some sort of spatial flux. It looks to be stationary, though, so as
soon as we get through it—“

As he spoke, the trembling of the
ship mercifully ceased. “All stop,” Hernandez said to Walcott, standing and
walking over to the science station. “I take it we’re out?”

For a moment Brace didn’t answer,
then he turned around and nodded. “Yes, Captain, we’re clear.”

“Keep scanning the area, Mr. Brace, I
want to have a look at this thing. If it’s dangerous, we’ll leave message buoys
to warn other ships,” Hernandez said, and turned to her pilot. “Move us another
hundred thousand kilometers away, Rachel, then come about.”

She then walked over to her
communications officer. “Leo, where’s Commander Tucker?”

Hernandez pressed the comm button
herself. “Commander Tucker, this is the bridge, over.” She waited about thirty
seconds before she tried again. “Charlie, this is Captain Hernandez on the
bridge, respond please.”

She’d thought calling him Charlie
would work—in the nearly seven years they’d been serving together, it had
become something of a running joke that she would call him Charlie when she
wanted to get a rise out of him. He had no idea how very much she liked that
she was the only one who could get away with it. How very much she liked him,
in fact.

Still no response. And it was not
like Trip to ignore the comm, even when he was fast asleep. If it went off, he
always answered.

“I’m going to go see what’s keeping
him. Rachel, you have the bridge. And get me a damage report while you’re at
it,” said the captain, as she marched over to the lift to see what was going on
with her first officer.

When she reached his quarters on C
Deck, she tried ringing his buzzer. “Charlie, this isn’t funny anymore, open
the door,” she said after the third try. When still he did not answer, she
heaved a frustrated sigh—he had to
be here. He’d told her that he was going straight to bed when she’d relieved
him hardly more than half an hour ago.

Reaching
over to the keypad, she pressed a series of numbers that would allow her to
override the lock and enter without consent. When the door swished open she
stepped over the threshold, fully prepared to yell for at least a minute
because she’d had to come all the way down here.

Erika
Hernandez did not expect to find his bunk empty. Turning around, she reached
for the comm panel next to his door, calling down to the mess hall, then the
armory, then the gym, and finally engineering. He was in none of those places.
Next she called the bridge to see if he had reported in, and they still hadn’t
heard from him, either.

“Rachel,
alert security: I want a deck-by-deck search for him,” she said, a sense of
dread beginning to form a knot in her stomach.

“Captain?” Lt. Walcott queried.

“Just
do it, Lieutenant. Commander Tucker is missing.”

*****

More
than an hour later, after a deck-by-deck, room-by-room search and a scan of all
the access tunnels, nooks, crannies and closets on the ship, her crew had no
other choice but to report the worst…

…Commander
Tucker had vanished.

But
they did find something very interesting
in his quarters. Hernandez had not noticed at first, hadn’t even looked there
because she’d expected to find him in his bed. A more thorough search of
Tucker’s personal space, however, turned up an exact replica of Rachel Walcott
in the head, unconscious on the floor.

Hernandez had the doppelganger
carried to Sickbay. Dr. Lena Rosenbaum was scanning the woman as their own
Rachel Walcott walked in, having decided to go down when she heard that
someone—who was not Commander
Tucker—had been found in his quarters.

She stopped short upon seeing her
own face on the unconscious form. “What the hell?” she muttered, looking from
the person on the bed, to Dr. Rosenbaum, to Captain Hernandez, and then back
again.

“I found her in Tucker’s bathroom,”
said the captain. “I don’t know how she got there, but then I have no idea how
Charlie disappeared, either.”

“I have run every bioscan
conceivable,” said Rosenbaum at last, putting down her instruments. “I’ve
checked her DNA, her RNA, blood samples---I even did a micro-cellular scan of
her bone marrow. Except for some sort of quantum level fluctuations, the reason
for which I have yet to identify, this woman is Lt. Rachel Walcott.”

“Well, apparently, so is she,”
Hernandez mused, gesturing toward their unconscious guest. “The question is:
how did she get here? And where’s Charlie?”

“That spatial disturbance we ran
into, do you think it had anything to do with this?” asked the doctor.

Hernandez shrugged. “I’m open to any
theories at this point, though considering Charlie disappeared and this Rachel
apparently came aboard during the time we got caught in it, I’d say that’s a
very distinct possibility.”

“So how the hell do we send her back
to wherever it is she came from?” Rachel asked, clearly unnerved by the
presence of her mirror image. “And get Commander Tucker back?”

Hernandez looked at her, placing a
hand on her shoulder in a comforting gesture. “I don’t know, but we will try. I
want him back, too, Rachel.”

At that moment, Daniel Brace walked
into Sickbay. Hernandez started to ask her science officer to report on his
findings, but the grimly determined look on his face stopped her, especially as
he walked right up to the unconscious Rachel on the bed and scanned her with
the hand scanner he carried.

“Just what I was afraid of,” he
said, turning slowly to the three women staring expectantly at him.

Brace sighed, his countenance one of
defeat. Erika didn’t like that one bit.

“My preliminary findings determined
that the spatial flux was some kind of quantum rift. Quite possibly some sort
of gateway between dimensions,” Brace began. “When I heard about our friend
here, how she was in the place Commander Tucker was supposed to be in, I got a
hunch that when he was taken, she was traded for him. In layman’s terms, it’s
called the equal exchange theory. To make up for the fact that he appeared in
her dimension, she appeared in ours—it’s all about maintaining balance in
both places. It could even have happened simultaneously. That’s why I scanned
her, I had to be sure. Her quantum signature matches that of the energy
readings emanating from the rift.”

Rosenbaum nodded. “Then that
explains the readings I got when I examined her,” she said. “Her body is in a
state of quantum flux, because she was somehow…transported, from her universe
to ours.”

“Would Commander Tucker be going
through the same thing, wherever he is?” Hernandez wondered.

“What I want to know is can we send
her back?” broke in Rachel. “She doesn’t belong here, she belongs…wherever. Is
there any way to send her back through the rift and get Commander Tucker back?
To rebalance the dimensions or whatever?”

Brace’s second sigh, coupled with
his crestfallen expression, caused the knot of dread that had formed in
Hernandez’ stomach to twist painfully. She didn’t want to hear what he had to
say, even while knowing she had no choice.

“I have some really bad news,” he
said softly. “For one thing, the rift is entirely too unstable to risk sending anything
through. The gravitational forces could very well tear a shuttlepod apart—to
be honest, I’m surprised we didn’t sustain any more damage than minor hull
fractures, but that could just be due to Columbia’s
size. Secondly, there’s really no guarantee she would end up where she came
from, and there’s no way for us to communicate with whoever is on the other
side to find out if Commander Tucker is even alive over there.”

Hernandez swallowed, not wanting to
ask because she feared she already knew the dreadful answer. “Why do I get the
feeling that’s not even the worst of it?” she forced herself to say.

Brace looked her straight in the
eye, himself wishing he didn’t have to bear the terrible news. “Because it’s
not, Captain. The worst part is, the rift is closing. At the rate it’s
collapsing, in less than two hours it will be gone.”

Gone,
the captain thought, a deep sadness settling over her. Meaning no way to send the second Rachel
Walcott back to her own dimension…

…and no way to bring Charlie back to
his.

Part
Two: Day of the Dead

October
31, 2161

Hernandez rang the buzzer on
Rachel’s quarters, wondering why in the world her first officer wasn’t
answering. It wasn’t like Lt. Commander Walcott not to respond, even when as
exhausted as she had been coming off her last third shift rotation of the week.
No matter how tired Rachel was at any given time, she always answered a summons.

Frustrated by the lack of response,
Hernandez punched her security override code into the keypad next to the door. She
stepped over the threshold fully intending to yell for having to come all the
way down here. Rachel wasn’t in her bed, so the captain looked in her first
officer’s bathroom. The sight that met her eyes in there had her gasping in
shock and backing out into the main room.

No
way, she thought, swallowing hard past the knot in her throat. It’s just not possible—Trip is dead!

Apparently
not that dead, said another,
slightly more hysterical voice.

This was impossible, completely
impossible, Hernandez told herself, even as she stared at the still form that lay
on the bathroom floor. How he’d gotten into Rachel’s bathroom, she couldn’t
begin to guess. Wasn’t even sure she wanted to, because for all intents and
purposes the man should not be lying
there. Was he unconscious? Dead? Who the hell was he and just what was he doing here? How did he get here?

And where was Rachel?

Taking a deep, steadying breath,
Erika Hernandez knew there was only one way to start finding out the answers to
those questions. Cautiously she stepped forward, kneeling to check the pulse in
the neck of the man who looked so very much (okay, exactly) like someone she
knew had died back in April. His heartbeat was strong and steady, so he was
very much alive. Just unconscious. And she wasn’t about to wake him, at least
not yet.

Standing, Hernandez stepped over to
the comm panel next to the door. “Hernandez to Dr. Rosenbaum.”

Lena Rosenbaum answered seconds
later. “Yes, Captain?”

She cast a glance down at the form
on the floor. “I need you to come to Commander Walcott’s quarters with a couple
of medics. We’ve got a situation.”

*****

“I’ve run every conceivable test,
Captain. Except for this strange quantum level fluctuation, it is him.”

“But that’s got to be impossible,
Lena! He’s dead.”

“Look at the readings here. I’ve
compared them with everything we have on file from when he served with us
almost seven years ago—it’s definitely
Trip.”

“Of course it’s me,” Trip said
groggily, sitting up slowly due to the pounding of his head. He took a look
around and frowned as he swung his legs over the side of the bed. “How’d I get
to Sickbay?”

Both Hernandez and Rosenbaum turned
sharply to face him. They walked over to stand together in front of the man the
captain had found.

“Who are you?” Hernandez asked.

Trip frowned. “Erika, what do you
mean, who am I?”

“It’s Captain Hernandez to you.”

The lines of his brow creased
further. “Since when do we stand on formalities? I’ve been calling you Erika
for more ’n six years. You call me Charlie—you’re the only one who gets away
with that, remember?”

The expressions on the two women’s
faces didn’t look right. In fact, they looked as if both of them had seen a
ghost. Ironic, considering it was Halloween.

“Okay, I don’t know what’s going on
here, but I give up. Joke’s on me, I accept it,” he said, hoping that whatever
was going on really was somebody’s idea of a joke, even if it was nowhere near
funny. “And hey, Lena, can I get something for this headache? Speaking of
which, is that why I’m here? Did I fall or something?”

Although she felt a little
uncomfortable with how he so casually addressed her by her first name,
Rosenbaum nonetheless walked over to a tray of instruments and loaded a
hypodermic with medication. Hernandez regarded the patient carefully as the doctor
administered a dosage into his arm. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

Trip was confused. Why would she ask
such a question? “When you relieved me at the start of first shift, I told you
I was wiped out and that I’d be going straight to bed—which is exactly what I
did. Next thing I know, I’m waking up here. And I’m wondering why the two of
you are looking at me like that.”

Trip’s eyes widened. “Wait, did I
miss something? When did you promote Rachel?”

“Rachel Walcott was promoted to
lieutenant commander three years ago, when I named her as my first officer
after Frank Lipton took the Apollo,”
Hernandez replied automatically.

“Now hold on a minute,” Trip said,
sliding off the bed to stand on his feet. “Ain’t no way—I’m the one’s been first officer of this ship for the last three
years. And this morning, Rachel was still a lieutenant.”

It was then that he noticed one of Columbia’s security officers standing
just inside the door. Another glance around showed him he was the only patient,
which meant he was the one being guarded.

Trip
looked between Hernandez and Rosenbaum. “Somebody please tell me what the heck
is going on here?” he said as the Sickbay doors opened and Daniel Brace walked
in.

“Danny,
thank the good Lord. Will you tell me what’s going on? Hey, what are you
doing?” he added, as Brace walked straight up to him and pointed a hand scanner
at his chest. After pushing a couple of buttons, the younger man nodded.

“Just
what I thought,” Brace said as he turned and faced Hernandez. “Captain, I’ve
got news. That spatial distortion we ran into is much more than that—it’s a
rift, a tear in the fabric of space-time.”

“Whoa,
what spatial distortion?” asked Trip.

Again,
Hernandez ignored him, crossing her arms and looking at her science officer.
“What else can you tell me about it?” she asked.

“There
are massive amounts of quantum energy emanating from the event horizon,” Brace
continued, “and the signature of those energy readings doesn’t match anything
in the surrounding space. It doesn’t match the quantum signature of this ship
or anyone on it, either. Except for him—it matches him. Captain, I think we crossed a connection to a parallel
reality.”

Rosenbaum
brightened. “That would explain why this man’s body is in a state of quantum
flux—it’s because he’s not originally from this universe.”

“Hello!”
Trip said, stepping in the middle of them. “I am standing right here. So please
stop talking about me like I’m not capable of understanding you. And I have a
name, which you all damn well know is Charles Tucker.”

Hernandez
looked at him for a moment, then quickly between Brace and Rosenbaum. “The two
of you are sure of your findings?” she asked. They both nodded, and so the
captain turned her attention back to the man she could no longer deny was
Commander Tucker. “My apologies. I had to be sure.”

He
relaxed a little. “Sure about what? Me? Why?”

Captain
Hernandez looked him square in the eyes. “Because the Charles Tucker I know
died six months ago.”

Trip
stared, could only stare at her because what she’d just said was completely
absurd. “How can you say that, Erika? I’ve been serving with you for over half a
decade—“

“No,
you served with another Erika
Hernandez,” Brace told him. “The Commander Tucker we know only served on Columbia for the first month after we
launched. That was almost seven years ago. He went back to Enterprise, where he stayed until he died.”

“Six
months ago, you say? So that would have been back in April, right?” Trip asked.

Hernandez
nodded. “Enterprise was on her way
home, to be decommissioned. Captain Archer was to make a speech at the signing
of the Charter of the United Federation of Planets.”

Trip
waved a hand dismissively. “I know all about that—we watched him make his
speech on the main viewer because we couldn’t get back in time. Jonathan’s
captain of the Atlantis now…or did
that not happen here?”

“Oh,
it did. But they almost didn’t make it to the signing of the charter on time
because of Captain Archer’s friendship with the Andorian Shran,” Hernandez
pointed out. “Shran asked for Enterprise’s
help in rescuing his daughter, who’d been kidnapped. The venture was
successful, but the kidnappers tracked Enterprise
down and boarded her. They had you—they had our Trip and Archer and were
demanding to be taken to Shran, who was still on board. Archer was refusing but
the other Tucker said he would bring Shran to where they were. He led them to a
utility closet and said there was a comm station there, said he had to connect
a couple things first. What he actually did was join two oppositely polarized
plasma conduits together, causing an explosion. He stopped the men from
achieving their goal, killed them, in fact, but the cost was his own life.”

“No.
No, no, no!” Trip cried, spinning and bracing his hands on the bed he’d vacated
a few minutes ago. “That was Reed—Malcolm was the one who died.”

“I’m
sorry, Commander. But it was you,” Hernandez said quietly.

He
turned back, and looked at Brace. “You’re absolutely sure I came from some sort
of parallel universe? That this is not
my Columbia?”

The
scientist nodded. “I’m fairly certain, Commander. There’s no other way to
explain what happened. The rift somehow created a corridor between our two
dimensions and exchanged you for Rachel, probably because you each had the same
quarters on the Columbia: first
officer’s quarters. It’s the simplest explanation of the equal exchange
theory—when one object of mass crossed the event horizon of the singularity,
an object of similar mass was left in its place in order to maintain balance
between the two universes.”

Trip
nodded slowly, raising a hand to stroke his chin. “Believe it or not, I
actually understand that. There’s only one problem, though: I have at least
fifty pounds on Rachel Walcott, at least the one I know. So unless yours weighs
around one-seventy, as opposed to the one-twenty I know my Rachel weighs, balance has not been maintained. Definitely
not an equal exchange.”

Brace
shrugged. “I said similar mass, not exact mass. The theory isn’t precise. It
could be that you and our Rachel exchanged places simply because you were in
the same place at the same time.”

The
intercom sounded then. “Bridge to Lt.
Brace.”

Brace
walked over to a work station and keyed open the comm channel. “Brace here, go
ahead.”

“We’ve been monitoring the singularity like
you asked, and I think we have a serious problem, sir.”

Brace
looked back at the others, then said, “Transfer the data down to unit two in
Sickbay, Ensign.”

“Will do, Lieutenant.”

As
the work station’s monitor came to life, Hernandez, Tucker and Rosenbaum walked
over to stand behind him. “What are we looking at, Danny?” the captain asked.

Brace
didn’t answer at first, though his expression—which grew more horrified as he
studied the data scrolling across the screen—spoke volumes. The news was not
good.

“Son
of a bitch,” he muttered, before switching off the monitor and turning
resignedly to face the three curious faces.

“When
I came in here and scanned Commander Tucker, to see if his quantum signature
matched that of the energy flowing out of the rift, it was with the idea that
we might be able to send him back through, and get Lt. Commander Walcott sent
back to us. But there’s no way. It’s impossible now.”

“Why
is it impossible?” Trip asked. “Just put me in a shuttlepod. I’ll go through
the rift and make sure to put your Rachel in it and send her back through. We
switch places again.”

Brace
shook his head. “It would be far too dangerous to try. The gravitational forces
at the center of the singularity are increasing with each passing
moment—there’s no way to know if a shuttlepod could pass through without
being crushed, or that you’d even come out in the right place. And I’m afraid
we’ve run out of time, even if we were to attempt sending you through despite
the risk.”

“I’m
willing to take that risk,” pressed Tucker. “I don’t belong here, you’ve all
said so.”

“I
told you, it’s too late. We don’t have the time to reconfigure the shield
system of one of our shuttlepods.”

“Why
do you say it’s too late, Lieutenant?” asked Dr. Rosenbaum.

Brace
looked at each of them in turn, his eyes settling on Tucker. “Because the
singularity is collapsing. The rift’ll be gone in less than two hours.”

Part
Three: Faith of the Heart

October
31, 2161

Captain Hernandez hadn’t told them
why she wanted Atlantis to rendezvous
with Columbia en route to Earth, but
as urgent as she had seemed in her brief transmission, Jonathan Archer could
hardly refuse the request. They had just returned Ambassador Soval to Vulcan
and had not yet received new orders, so a short pleasure cruise was a welcome
diversion.

During his lunch with T’Pol, he’d expressed
his curiosity as to the reason behind his fellow captain’s request, and his
Vulcan first officer had, in her usual droll style, reminded him that had
Hernandez wished him to know before the time of the rendezvous, she would have
told him.

“Perhaps she has a surprise for
you,” she’d said, coming close to making a joke.

Still, the mystery nagged at him,
and by the time they arrived at the prearranged coordinates just outside
Earth’s solar system at around 1700 hours, Archer was awash with anticipation. Columbia was already in place, and their
communications officer transmitted his captain’s request that he, T’Pol and
Malcolm Reed would meet her in the captain’s private dining room.

“Doctor, can I ask you what this is
about?” Archer asked as she led them out.

“You can, sir, but I am not at
liberty to discuss the matter without Captain Hernandez present,” Rosenbaum
replied.

They walked down the corridor and at
the end of it she pressed the call button for the lift. “It’s not some kind of
Halloween prank, is it?” Archer pressed, laughing a little.

Rosenbaum allowed a small smile,
though he still could not quite get a full read of her expression. “No,
Captain. I can assure you it is nothing of the kind.”

After the lift arrived, they all
stepped inside, riding up to B Deck in silence. In the mess hall, the three Atlantis officers nodded politely to the
crewmembers they knew, though their attention was on the door that led to the
captain’s private dining room. When it opened, they saw that Hernandez was not
alone. A man whose frame looked eerily familiar stood facing the window, his
head down and his face cast in shadow.

“What’s this about, Erika?” Archer
asked without preamble, still staring at the man across the room.

Hernandez, standing next to her
customary chair, gestured to the three chairs along one side of the table. “I
think you’ll all want to sit down, Jonathan,” she said quietly.

As soon as he, T’Pol and Reed had
done so, the man across the room turned slowly to face them.

“What the bloody hell is going on?”
Malcolm Reed asked, his shock-laden voice resounding loudly in the small room.

Standing before them was the
spitting image of Charles “Trip” Tucker.

Alive and well.

For his part, this Tucker,
technically the third they had ever seen (the others being the one who had died
and the clone called Sim), moved and sat wordlessly in the single chair across
from their three seats. He looked as if he wanted to speak, but raked his eyes
away from the visitors and looked instead to Captain Hernandez.

Archer, too, forced his gaze toward
the woman, who sat down last. “Erika?” he said simply.

She looked at Trip, then to Archer,
and explained the events that had transpired that morning. “We lost Rachel
Walcott,” she added sadly. “And I am going to miss her—she was a good friend of
mine. But we got someone else back that we lost in the exchange.”

“Are you trying to tell us that he’s
as good as our Trip? Virtually the same?” Reed asked incredulously.

Trip spoke for the first time. “Dr.
Rosenbaum says that the longer I stay here, the more my ‘quantum signature’
will adjust to this universe. Eventually it will be as if I was born here. Or
so she says,” he told them.

“I do not doubt the findings of your
crew, Captain Hernandez,” said T’Pol, her eyes fixed on the man sitting across
from her. “However, I respectfully request access to the data collected so that
I may study it myself.”

Hernandez looked at her. “You’re
welcome to it, Commander,” she said, having expected the Vulcan to ask. She had
a feeling Jonathan would also want to have a look.

“Does Starfleet know about this
yet?” asked Archer.

“We spoke to them, yes. And have
already transmitted copies of every scan, both of the singularity and Commander
Tucker,” answered Hernandez.

“I’ve even spoken to my parents,”
Trip told them, the first hint of a smile gracing his features as he looked at
Archer. “Mama’s already planning a big pan-fried catfish dinner for me.”

“Pan-fried catfish always was his—your—favorite,”
Archer said.

“I’m really sorry for what happened
to the Trip you knew,” said Tucker. “In my universe—my original one, anyway—it
was Lt. Reed who died.”

“Me?” Reed responded.

Trip nodded. “Apparently you did the
same thing as my other self did here,” he explained.

“This…this is…” Archer stood, pacing
as well as he could in the limited space of the small dining room. “I’m not
even sure what to say right now, I’m so completely stunned. I… I feel like I’ve
just started to really recover from losing you, and then here you are again,
looking exactly like you did before you...well, before your accident.”

“I promise you, I have no intentions
of trying to replace the Tucker you lost,” Trip reassured them, pointedly looking
at T’Pol for a full three seconds. “I don’t know that I would have even spoken
to my parents just yet had Starfleet not taken the liberty of going to them for
me. My mama…she was a mess at first. And my dad…”

“I’m sure they’re both just glad to
have their boy back, Trip,” Archer said when his voice trailed off. “And I
think I’m just going to be glad I have my friend back.”

Trip visibly relaxed when Archer
smiled at him, and laughed aloud when Reed added, “I know I’m sure not going to
look a gift horse in the mouth.”

*****

Archer walked into the science lab
on the Atlantis and stood for a moment just watching T'Pol, who sat
virtually immobile as she sat at one of the consoles and stared at the data
flowing across her screen. The only parts of her that moved were her eyes, as
she read the information from Columbia's
report, and her finger, as she tapped a button to scroll down the screen.

To most any other person, she would
seem to be merely studying the data—and outwardly, that's what he saw. But he
knew her better than that. In the ten years he had known her, Archer had gone
from loathing her very presence to respecting her a great deal. He even cared
about her, as she had become a trusted friend and confidant. His faith in her
as a friend and as an officer were what prompted him to ask her to serve with
him again when Starfleet had offered him command of the Atlantis.

He knew that while she may appear as
impassive as any other Vulcan on the outside, inside she was still reeling, her
emotions in turmoil because of what had happened earlier in the day. Because
Trip had, for all intents and purposes, come back from the dead.

He could empathize with her
feelings. He was still in shock, too.

Stepping further into the room, he
said finally, "You've been studying that report for hours, T'Pol. It's
almost midnight."

"I am aware of the hour,"
she said without looking at him.

Archer sighed, and moved to sit at
the console on her right, spinning the chair around so he could straddle it. He
laid his arms atop one another on the backrest as he regarded her stoic
expression, which to his well-trained eye looked as if it was taking an effort
to maintain. "Commander, I get it. You're still in shock over what
happened today—hell, I am, too. Believe me, I know how you feel, but staring at
that screen isn't going to change the facts."

T'Pol turned to look at him.
"With all due respect, Captain, you do not know
how I feel," she said in a flat tone, before turning her eyes to
the screen before her once more.

He didn't miss the emphasis she
placed on the word "I", nor how her voice had for a split second
wavered. "Then maybe you could tell me," he said gently. "Can't
be too far removed from how I or Malcolm feels."

Her right eyebrow lifted.
"Again, you would be incorrect," she retorted, then drew a long
breath through her nose.

"I must concur with Lt. Brace's
initial assessment," T'Pol said then. "As we do not have a complete
understanding of the means by which the duplicate Tucker and Rachel Walcott
were exchanged for one another, any attempt to create another spatial rift
would be extremely ill-advised. The exchange cannot be undone."

"Do you really want it to be
undone?"

Archer had been asking himself that
question ever since he had seen Trip's face across that table. If it could be
done, would he really want to send this Trip back to where he came from? He
knew that if it were possible, sending him back would be the right thing to do.
This new Trip's family and friends in that other universe would surely miss him
as much as they had been missing the Trip from this universe for the last six months. Yet he had
been forced to admit—to himself at least—that a part of him was glad they
couldn't do it. The man he had met today was almost exactly the same man he had
known, with a difference of but a few years. All the time he had shared with
Charles Tucker in this universe, this new Charles Tucker had shared with him in
the other one.

Well, at least until seven years
ago.

Yet despite that point of
divergence, Archer couldn't help feeling happy that he did, in essence, have
his friend back. He knew he wasn't precisely the same person, but they
were so damn close to being the same that it was almost as if there was no
difference. During their time together on the Columbia, after the initial shock had worn off, he had felt himself
relaxing. Trip had relaxed as well, and before he even knew it, they were
laughing and talking like old times. It was as if the last six months were
nothing more than a bad dream, or that perhaps Trip had been on some sort of
long-term assignment.

His question, so simply put, at last
garnered more than indifference from T'Pol. Her hand began to tremble and her
breathing became shallow. Archer reached over and placed one of his hands on top
of hers. "T'Pol, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to upset you," he said
softly.

When she looked at him, he was
rather surprised to see tears in her eyes. "I know that logically, he is
not the same man we lost," she said softly. "Yet I find
myself..."

She blinked and looked away. Archer
gave her hand a gentle squeeze. "You find yourself what? Feeling like he
is, or that he could be?"

Slowly, she nodded. "I was
bonded with our Charles Tucker," she said after a moment. "It is a
bond that would have remained despite my initial intention to serve on a
different ship than he following the decommissioning of Enterprise. Our bond was severed when he
died."

Archer nodded, recalling that she
could very well have died when the bond between her and Trip was severed. It
was no small miracle that she had found the strength of will to remain living,
but then, he mused, she had never really given herself fully to Trip, had she?
It had frustrated his best friend beyond comprehension how she could claim to
love him and yet hold him at arms length like she did.

"Ever since Trip's death I have
felt this void inside myself, and despite my greatest efforts I have been
unable to deny its existence, let alone begin to fill it," T'Pol went on.
"When I entered Captain Hernandez' private dining room, I felt a strange
sense of familiarity, even before I saw his face. I felt...whole."

She looked at him again, and he saw
that her eyes were still wet with tears, though they had yet to fall. "I
looked into the eyes of that man we met today and in an instant it was as if
the void had never been. It is as if I know him as intimately as I knew the
other. And I do not understand how that can be when he is not the same
person."

Archer sighed. "We're not as
different as you think, you and I—I know that probably sounds strange coming
from me," he added with a small chuckle. "But the truth is, T'Pol,
that I feel almost exactly the same as you. I know he's not the same man, but
he looks like him and sounds like him and acts like him. His eyes are the same,
his smile is the same, his laugh... And even though I know that his last seven
years aren't the same as mine, I feel like he is as much my best friend as the
other ever was. It's almost like Trip never left."

He noted understanding in her eyes
and offered her a small smile. "I can only imagine how hard this must be
for you, for someone who was connected to Trip on a level I could not begin to
understand. But if I am understanding you correctly, you're telling me that you
felt the same connection with this man that you had with our Trip."

She nodded again, and after giving
her hand another gentle squeeze, Archer let it go and stood. "I've loved a
few women in my life, T'Pol, but I've never really been in love. I've certainly never had
anything even remotely like what you had with Trip. Though I don't really know
why, I know that you were willing to sacrifice that connection once upon a
time, so if I were to hazard a guess, maybe you've connected with this Trip
because in your heart, you never really wanted to let the other one go. Maybe
you should think about that before you deny yourself what most of us never
get."

"What, may I ask, is
that?"

He smiled. "A second
chance."

*****

November 1, 2161

Several hours later, Trip walked out
onto the back porch of his parents’ Florida home. He was beyond happy to have
brought them joy—as Jonathan had said, they were happy to have their boy back—but
there was a tiny voice in his head reminding him that they weren’t his parents, they were the other Trip’s
parents. The one who had died. This wasn’t really his parents’ home, this
wasn’t his Earth, wasn’t even his universe.

But it would be, eventually. All of
it would be. Even now his quantum signature was continuing to adjust itself to
this universe, and he would in the very near future be the same as the Trip
who’d died back in April. Physically, anyway. Mentally, he would probably
always feel somewhat like an outsider, like he didn’t quite measure up or would
always be under scrutiny because everyone else would know he wasn’t their Trip,
just as well as he knew it.

It was well after midnight, and his
parents (although he knew they weren’t, he couldn’t help thinking of them that
way) had finally gone to bed, their rapturous excitement over his “return”—“An
early Christmas miracle!” his mother had declared—finally drained. And even
though no one else in the house was awake, it had begun to close in on him,
stifling the air inside and cutting off his ability to breathe. So he stepped
out onto the back veranda for some fresh, crisp, first-day-of-November air. It
was a little cool outside, but the sky was clear and the stars shone brightly,
the moon full and bathing the back yard in a muted glow. He leaned against the
porch railing, bracing his forearms against the aged, sturdy wood and just
relished the first really quiet moment he’d had since waking up in the Sickbay
of a Columbia that wasn’t really his.

The sound of cautious footsteps
coming around the corner of the house had him turning his head to the right. He
thought maybe it was Jonathan, whom he hadn’t seen since leaving the Columbia upon their arrival in Earth’s
orbit, or perhaps his brother, but was rather surprised to see T’Pol
walking toward him. He hadn’t seen her since coming to Earth, either. Unwillingly,
the thought of how lovely she looked in the moonlight flashed into his head.

Six years hadn’t been long enough to
erase those feelings, it would seem.

He straightened as she came to a
stop directly beneath him. “What are you doing here? It’s after midnight,” he
said quietly. “You should be in bed, or taking care of Henry.”

T’Pol raised an eyebrow. “I am aware
of the hour. Who is Henry?”

“Uh, your son. The one John Paxton
created by cloning, using your DNA and Captain Archer’s, the one you guys named
after Jonathan’s father,” he said, and then suddenly he realized why she was
looking at him with as disbelieving an expression as he had ever seen her wear.

“There is no Henry, is there?” he
said, sighing wearily. Would he ever get used to all the differences in this
universe?

T’Pol shook her head. “No. The child
you speak of did exist here, however. Only in this universe, the child was
female and she was created via a combination of my DNA and yours. We named her
Elizabeth, in honor of your sister.”

His eyes widened. He’d had a child
with T’Pol? Cloned or not, he’d had a child with her? Running a hand through
his hair, he said, “Where I’m from, the baby was a boy. They used your DNA and
Jonathan’s, because by that time I’d already left Enterprise. Dr. Phlox saved him by resequencing his RNA or
something like that. You left Starfleet so you could raise him.”

T’Pol was silent for a long moment,
her expression thoughtful. “I am…pleased for the T’Pol where you are from,” she
said at last. “She did not have to suffer as we did here.”

“I take that to mean Elizabeth
didn’t make it?”

“No,” she said. “Unfortunately, our
daughter was not strong enough to survive by the time we were rescued by Enterprise.”

Our
daughter. As if he
had been the child’s father.

Oh, but one could dream.

Trip cleared his throat. “I’m sorry
for your loss,” he said.

T’Pol inclined her head. “Thank
you.”

“Guess that would explain why you were
wearing a proper Starfleet uniform this morning instead of civvies,” Trip went
on. “Looks good on you, by the way. Anyhow, you still haven’t answered my
question: What are you doing here?”

“I thought perhaps you would like to
know that my analysis of your abrupt arrival in this universe is, as concluded
by Lt. Brace, irreversible,” she explained. “You will have to remain here in
this universe, and Rachel Walcott will have to remain in the other.”

He scoffed, though not with intent to
mock her. Trip walked over to the porch steps and dropped heavily onto the top
one, saying, “I kinda figured that’d be the case.”

“What will you do now?” T’Pol asked.

“I don’t know,” Trip said honestly.

“You are a highly qualified
engineer. It would be illogical for you not to remain in service with
Starfleet, or at least to pursue a career in the engineering field,” the Vulcan
admonished.

“I don’t know,” he said again. “I
suppose sticking with Starfleet would
be the sensible, ‘logical’ thing to do. And more than likely I’ll end up
requesting a post on one of the new warp 7 ships. But this whole thing has made
me think—at least when I’ve had time for independent thought—and I’ve been
reevaluating my priorities while I’ve tried to figure out what I’m gonna do
with myself here.”

T’Pol raised one of her impeccably
arched eyebrows. “May I ask what conclusions you have reached during your
self-analysis?”

He looked away, suddenly unable to
meet her eyes. “Well, mostly I want the same stuff I’ve always wanted: a career
in Starfleet with a captaincy someday, a wife and kids. Probably the only one
I’ll ever get is the career. Maybe the captaincy.”

“Why would you not also have a wife
and children if you so desire them? You are what most human females consider a
very attractive man, and certainly you are still healthy enough to conceive
numerous offspring. Human males have been known to produce viable sperm well
into their seventies.”

He couldn’t help but laugh, though
it was slightly bitter. Trip glanced at her sidelong as he said, “It doesn’t
help when the only woman I’ve ever been in love with is in an entirely
different universe, T’Pol. Besides that, she doesn’t feel the same way.
Wouldn’t matter even if she was here.”

“Does she have a duplicate in this
universe? Perhaps you could court her counterpart, whose feelings might differ
from the woman you know,” she suggested.

“Somehow I very much doubt it,” Trip
said, standing and pacing a few steps out into the yard.

T’Pol stared and, disgusted with
himself for having allowed her to goad him into revealing how he felt, however
unwittingly, he turned away again, hanging his head as he shoved his hands into
his pockets and started to walk away from her.

“Trip!” she called after him.

Trip froze, but didn’t turn back,
forcing T’Pol to walk over to where he stood. Moving to stand in front of him,
she waited until he looked at her before speaking.

“In this universe, you and I had an
intimate relationship,” she began.

Trip raised his arms to cross them
over his chest, his own eyebrows raised expectantly.

“We had an intimate relationship,
but we ended it. The fault was mostly mine, though to cover my insecurities I
claimed the reason as being that I intended to serve on a different starship
following the decommissioning of Enterprise,”
T’Pol continued.

His brow fell and creased into a
frown. “I cannot imagine you ever being insecure about anything,” he said
truthfully. “So how were you at fault?”

“Because I was dishonest as to the
true reason behind my desire to serve on a different starship, and thus be away
from you,” she replied. “Though certainly our physical relationship was more
than pleasing to me, I found that I desired more. And desiring more than a
merely physical relationship…frightened me. While I already cared for you
deeply as a friend, I was unprepared for the intensity with which I found
myself loving you. Vulcans are not supposed to feel fear, and needless to say,
the realization that I was afraid was very disconcerting.”

“Did you form a psychic bond with
him?” he found himself asking. “We…well, it happened to me and the T’Pol in my
universe. I can’t speak for her, but it’s been torturing me for damn near seven
years.”

Trip shrugged. “I can only go by
what she told me, no matter what I saw in my sleep,” he replied. “And it’s not
like she ever tried to tell me different.”

“Perhaps she was, through the dreams
she shared with you,” T’Pol returned. “Perhaps like me, she was frightened by
the intensity of her own feelings. And to answer your question, yes. I did
forge a psychic bond with the Charles Tucker who died six months ago.”

“So you loved him?” Trip asked.

T’Pol nodded. “Yes. I loved him.”

Returning his hands to his pockets,
Trip smiled. “Well then, he was a lucky man, whether you told him or not.”

He started to turn back toward the
house, but stopped when her hand shot out and caught him by the arm. He tried
to ignore the fire that shot along his nerves where her skin was in contact
with his. She’s not your T’Pol, he
told himself silently. Hell, your T’Pol
was never your T’Pol.

“I’m not finished.”

“Look, thank you for telling me
about your analysis of the rift that brought me here,” he interrupted without
looking at her. “And…thank you for telling me that you loved him. It sorta
helps to know that.”

At last he brought his gaze to hers.
“But I’m not him. And you know as well as I do that I’ll never really be him, no matter how much my physiology
will match his in the future. Mentally he and I are two very different people.”

When her hand left his arm to cup
his cheek, Trip found it suddenly very difficult to breathe, and was unable to
resist turning his head slightly to nestle his chin into her palm. He very
nearly stopped breathing altogether when her thumb began to graze his bottom
lip.

“T’Pol…”

“My feelings have not changed even
though the man I knew is gone, as I believe yours have not changed just because
you no longer share the same universe as the woman you know,” she said, her
voice low and husky. “And although logically I know you are not the same man
and I not the same woman, I am unable to deny that seeing you has reminded me
of all that I gave up when I said my feelings were not the same as his. I am
reminded of all that was lost to me when he died. And I feel…I feel as if I
have been given a chance to correct my mistake.”

Trip turned to face her fully, his
indifference melting away when he saw that a single tear was falling from the
corner of her left eye. He was completely vulnerable now, and that one tear
from a woman who never cried meant that she was, too. Raising his hand to her face,
he gently brushed the tear away.

“What are you saying?” he asked. He
had to know, had to hear her say it.

Her hands reached up to clasp the
one of his that still held her face. She brought it to her lips, kissing the
back of it softly, then held it over her heart. “It would please me greatly…
No. That is not how I want to say it.”

Looking up into his eyes, T’Pol’s
voice was quiet as she spoke again, saying, “I love you. It is not logical, but
it is true.”

No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t logical for
either one of them to feel this way, but Trip couldn’t deny that he felt the
same. He loved her—he would love T’Pol in any universe, whether it was the same
as his or not. Perhaps it was the psychic bond they had each formed with the
opposite versions of each other that was somehow connecting their hearts as it
once had their minds, but whatever the reason, he knew that it had taken a
great deal of personal strength for her to admit how she felt.

He could do no less.

Trip brought his other hand up to
place it on top of hers, where she held his other over her heart. “I love you,
too. I’m always going to love you,” he said. Then he leaned forward and pressed
his lips to hers. The kiss was soft and brief, but oh, so perfect for that
moment.

When their mouths parted, he touched
his forehead to hers, finally able to breathe again and relishing the perfect,
peaceful feeling that washed through him. It wasn’t going to be easy, adjusting
to life in this universe, but he was happy beyond words that she was going to
be by his side while he did so. Of that he had no doubt.

2 comments:

Wow, I really enjoyed this, and I'm saying this as someone who was never a fan of Enterprise and its characters. I did watch a lot of it, of course LOL and you really captured the feel of the characters and how they would sound. It was also good that there was no last minute rescue of the switched personnel, and that Trip had to deal with being someplace that was almost like his home, but not quite, a situation that could have triggered a psychotic break in someone else. The story length and pacing worked, and I'm a sucker for romantic endings :-) thanks for this...

So happy you were pleased even if you weren't a big fan of the show! The reason I wrote this one was, quite simply, because I *was* a fan and Tucker was my favorite character (my mother's maiden name was Tucker and her father's name was Charles, I kid thee not) and I was pissed that he was the one killed off in the episode I refuse to ever watch again (not because he died, but because they made it too much about Riker, IMHO).

I'm a sucker for romantic endings too, lol. I imagine that there would still be times Trip would struggle with his new reality, being in a universe where everyone he knew had said goodbye to him, at least for a while. But he seemed a guy who could see things straight and deal, and I wanted his new life to start out on a good note instead of a sour one.